Close your eyes. Pretend you are heading into the hospital where you work as a doctor. No more ‘heroes’. No more applauding crowds, no more hallways covered with signs and posters of gratitude from the community. Covid? Yesterdays news.
Walk into the ICU where you work. See the drawn and emotionally exhausted faces of some of the finest people on earth, the nurses, as they have faced month after month of death and prolonged suffering of their patients from this cruel, unrelenting, disease.
Now put on your PPE - gown, cap, respirator, face shield, gloves - as you have done hundreds of times before - knowing a deadly virus lurks. Watch people of all ages and pre-existing conditions suffer horribly - struggling for weeks to breathe, alone, their families forbidden to visit, their doctors reluctant to put them on ventilators. Eventually they do get their ventilators, for weeks on end, and then many die anyway. Ever watch a 23 year old previously healthy person suffocate and die despite all your best efforts?
And now imagine going home to a nation bored with the virus, rationalizing selfish, self-centered, behavior despite 225,000 deaths.
I don’t feel heroic in what I do as an ICU doctor, I feel betrayed by a spoiled, ignorant, country. Masks work. Most of the spread of this virus is by droplets that masks catch. Tens of thousands of lives can be saved, the virus brought under control, the economy fully open, if only 90% of the people would wear a mask at all times when out. Please, most of you are not medically trained. You in fact do not know best. Listen to the experts, respect the deaths and suffering of hundreds of thousands. Wear a mask.
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